Free It Shouldn't Happen to a Midwife! by Jane Yeadon Page A

a mocking way.
    â€˜You’ll be a wee while before you speak like a proper Scot, so you won’t,’ I jeered.
    I thought I might bottle out if I looked in the mirror so, when dressed, I asked for Seonaid’s opinion instead.
    She looked me over carelessly. ‘Grand now!’ She took a tailed comb from an enormous handbag and handed it over. ‘But you’ll need to do a bit of back-combing right at the top.’ She twiddled her finger above her head. ‘With your hair that flat, nobody’ll notice you.’
    Tonight Miss MacCready hadn’t that problem. With her hair splendidly bouffant and with a dress so shockingly pink it could have brought on a migraine, she glissaded over the foyer floor to greet us.
    â€˜Youse two planning to go out then?’
    â€˜Yes,’ said Seonaid, taking my arm as if I needed special assistance. ‘Jane needs to see a bit of the town and its rich heritage.’
    Miss MacCready cast a glance about her then whispered, ‘It wouldn’t be a blind date then?’
    â€˜Good gracious no!’ I said, even if the idea had some appeal.
    Miss MacCready looked doubtful. ‘I’m pleased to hear it. Ye see, I’d the same conversation with a wee nurse who’d just arrived here from the country. Lovely girl she was, so she was, and just like you she was going out and dressed much the same.’ Having made reproof as obvious as the draught swirling about my knees, she went on, ‘She told me someone from an agency had fixed her up with a date.’
    A night porter wheezed into sight. Coldly, the receptionist watched as he hung his jacket over a hard chair before sitting down. ‘How are ye, Jo?’ she asked, not bothering for a reply but returning to her saga. ‘Well, off she went into the night saying, “That’s me off, Miss MacCready – and I’m so excited.”’ With a breath intake enough to resite the pink, she held up two fingers. ‘ Two days later she came back … and …’
    At this rate we were going to miss all buses heading into town. Sneakily, I checked my watch but Miss MacCready didn’t notice – she was on a roll. ‘She didn’t know where she’d been nor,’ she paused for a moment, looked shiftily at Jo as if a man reading a newspaper constituted danger, then, bending low, she whispered, ‘who she’d been with!’
    A kirby grip fell to the floor, the bouffant threatened to topple, then straightening and cranking up the volume she continued, crying in genuine horror, ‘Or how many!’
    Jo shook his paper like someone reading something much more interesting whilst Miss MacCready righted herself, looked at her watch and sighed. ‘Anyway, I should be off duty. Jo here will let you in when and if you come back. Now hurry or you’ll miss that bus.’
    â€˜We’ll be very careful,’ we reassured her and tramped out into a night where the most threatening of company was an evil little wind. It pounced on us as if lonely. Clamouring for attention it whooped and whined, tugging and plucking on clothes so lacking in tartan, hypothermia seemed inevitable. It wailed in a desolate way as we caught the bus and stepped into a fag-filled fug no wind could dissipate .
    Clad in a frill mostly, Seonaid seemed impervious to the cold and sat glued to the window of our bus as it racketed down the Falls Road past its tenement houses, a news vender provocatively bawling ‘ Protestant Cooorrier , sixpence only!’, small shops fluttering orange and green flags, pawn brokers and big churches. Finally, we arrived at the warmer flirty girl that was Belfast’s city centre.
    There were glamorous clothes in brightly-lit shop windows. They promised sophistication likely to feature in the nearby hotels and restaurants and where a student midwife’s monthly pay could have gone on the first course. The more tangible prospect of fish